Breaking Bad 1.02 - Cat's in the Bag

[rogin]

General review

The episodes opens where the pilot ended to Walt and Skyler having sex, after which Walt passes out in bathroom. Walt may start to live a little, but he still is horribly sick.

We flash back to a hilarious scene, where  Walter and Jesse lie very unconvincingly to get their RV (still containing the dead  body of Emilio and the not so dead bod of Crazy 8) pulled from the ditch, paying phosphane stinky (rotten fish) wet money.

Jesse is stuck with the RV and the desperate hope that Crazy 8 will do them the favour and croak on his own. I love his fake call at the White's home and Walter's panicked reaction. "Because if you're unhappy with you long distance service, I'd really really like to talk to you." 
Bwahaha.

We see another one of Walter's high school lectures, this time about chirality. It serves to show how wrecked his nerves are but I wonder if it also contains a little symbolic foreshadowing about Walter developing this new harder persona. A mirror image of himself but dangerous and deadly.

I love the stages Walter and Jesse go through in dealing with the Crazy 8 situation. They have both no idea how to handle the problem, so at first they try to ignore it, hoping the problem will solve itself. When it doesn't and he breaks out of the RV and wanders though Jesse's suburban neighbourhood, Walter fortunately catches him and they store him in Jesse's basement.

They can't let Crazy 8 go as they are sure he'll kill the in revenge but killing a helpless sick man is a whole different deal from acting in spur of the moment self defence. Each of them kinda expects the other to be more badass than himself. Jesse somehow thinks because Walter just killed Emilio and is somewhat the grown up in their relationship, he will do what needs to be done while  Walter assumes that just because Jesse is a drug dealer murder can't be such a step up for him, which couldn't be farther from the truth. Jesse is not even a particularly violent person. A lot of his gangsta get up is just mimicry.

This is also the first time we get a closer look at Jesse's house and man do I love that house and the story it tells without ever really focusing on it. Jesse's aunt left it to him and while Jesse was in Walt's course he was already living there with her. Jesse's aunt can't be dead for very long, but he also must to some degree take care of the house. He kept everything as she left it, knows where she kept her concealer. He even kept it mostly clean. It all adds up to him being really close to his aunt and her being the dominant positive grown up in his life. He denied Walter to cook in the house with "I don't shit where I eat" in the pilot but sadly now his home is invaded. The homicidal dealer sitting in the cellar and the corpse rotting in the driveway.

Since Crazy 8 doesn't do them the favour of dying and they flip a coin and Jesse has to dissolve Emilio's body in acid.

Aaron Paul has an incredible talent for physical comedy, I laughed my ass off in those scenes where he tries the bike lock on himself and tries to fit himself into a PE basin to see if it's big enough for a corpse.

Walt is left with the task of killing Crazy 8. And that's where the show becomes fantastic, because Breaking Bad is brilliant in depicting the way we do bad things. How much easier it is when you don't have to think about it. Walt is totally himself now, there is no righteous fury to help him. This murder needs to be cold blooded and he's not capable of it.

Skyler meanwhile tries to figure out what sort of suspicious weirdo called Walt this morning and indeed manages to find Jesse's my shout page which is full of pretentious pseudogangster crap:

His interests read:

Fine Herbage! Keepin' it real, Jui Ryo Ki Kung-Fu (Blue belt with shuriken certification). Banging the skins with my smokin band 'TwaughtHammer'. European motocross (plan to attend Wheelie School in Vegas this summer). MILF's, MILF's, MILF's, MILF's! (Heeeee! He's such a kid!)

Education: J.P. Wynne High School, DeVry University data systems management...
The STREETS, YO!

Skyler's face when she figures out what MILFs are is priceless.

A lot of the episode shows Walter being not exactly a natural born killer. Instead of doing it, he keeps putting it off, bringing food and hygiene articles to crazy 8 (and how fantastic is that scene with the bucket and the toilet paper shot?). In the end he smokes Jesse's weed and then goes off to a doctor's appointment with Skyler (heh to Jesse finding his teacher stole his weed).

Skyler confronts Walt about Jesse and Walt lies that Jesse deals him pot and says that Skyler should get off his ass. That scene, where Walt's aggression and need to control his own live turns against Skyler? It's kinda really ugly.

Skyler has probably no easy standing within BB fandom. A bit like Rita on dexter, but less sweet. We follow the bad guy, Walt, we root for him, so it's hard to forget that Skyler is in the right here. She is Walt's actual partner, not Jesse,  she should have his trust and she's not getting it. Skyler is flawed but by no means a monster.  She loves Walt and wants to help him, but with Walt being such a passive person before his diagnose she's his catalyst, she tells him what to do. Now he has his own motivation and instead of telling her about his own plans (which are admittedly insane) he avoids the drama the conflict and just lies. It's very cowardly and she doesn't deserve it or the aggression she's getting.

As Jesse works up to moving the body, Skyler shows up and forbids him to ever sell  pot to Walt again. It's brilliant. Skyler is horribly funny having no idea how to deal with the supposed hardcore dealer Jesse who is scared shitless about the corpse and swears puzzled never to sell pot to Walter again.
Bwahahaha to Skyler's last line, when she's surprised that this was so easy "You might wanna  consider another line of work".

Jesse then proceeds to have a hilarious monologue about Walt while he hauls the corpse into his bathtub. Yes. Bathtub. And he means to put hydrofluoric acid in it.....oh Jesse.

Walter shows up again and they quarrel about him not having killed Crazy 8 yet and then predictably Jesse's ceiling comes down and the ickiest gore of tv history (aka Emilio) splatters all over the place.

The chemistry of "Cat's in the Bag"

Chirality:

In his chemistry lesson Walter explains chirality, where two molecules are mirror images of each other.  He uses the substance thalidomide as an example where one enantiomere is a drug against morning sickness and the other causes birth defects. He's talking about the Contergan scandal here that led to lots and lots of children with birth defects.

There are loads of such examples, meth actually being one of them. The vast majority of our receptors is built to accept only one enantiomere and separation of stereo isomers is a huge issue in pharmaceutical chemistry.

Dissolving of a body in acid:

Hydrofluoric acid (HF) is not a bad call, since it really does eat glass and bones but no plastic, just as they say on the show.
There would have been a few alternatives though. Concentrated Sulfuric acid or Hydrochloric  acid would work too and they are not nearly as dangerous to handle as HF since it's a contact poison. If you get hydrochloric acid on your fingers, you have time. By the time you feel the burn you can go and wash it off, without much harm done. HF however wont burn, because it kills off the nerves and causes cardiac arrest once it is absorbed into the blood stream so splashing it around as they do on the show? Crazy dangerous.

"Cat's in the Bag" in the light of the series

On the coin flip: It's interesting, considering how much saving Jesse  becomes a motive for Walt later in the series, because in those first few episodes Jesse and Walt are not all that close yet. Walt would gladly want for Jesse to kill Crazy 8, he invades Jesse's home. Not even realizing that yes, there are still a lot of things about Jesse that can still be broken.

Another interesting aspect that Walt and Jesse never learn about is that Crazy 8 is the snitch. He probably would have taken a chance not to kill them and then would have sold them out to the police. But they couldn't have known that and if they had it would have made things even more convoluted.